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3/6/2009

It just doesn’t look like a very good movie to me. I didn’t like 300 terribly much. It was visually accurate with the book, but I found it fairly boring for most of the way through. I’m tired of ILM demo reels masquerading as masterwork films. The actors, with the exception of Silk Spectre, all seem about 10-15 years too young, and far too shiny. Watchmen is not supposed to be a shiny movie, except in very specific parts. Also, by and large, it’s not an action movie, again except in very specific parts.

The goal of “I’m doing this so someone else won’t fuck it up worse” is laudable, but ultimately flawed.

I expect it’s going to be a lot like the Hitchhiker’s Guide movie – visually accurate but stripped of everything great except glancing references to everything great in the book. I don’t really need a reminder to go read the book again.

One of the most striking moments of the book is when you realize that even the visual panel structure in issue 5 is symmetrical around the assassination attempt on Veidt and is flanked on both sides by about eighty thousand important plot elements that have been carefully arranged for you, by hand, in advance. That is when you realize that what you’re holding in your hands is really something special. It can’t be done as a movie, because it’s not something that can make its impact when it just flashes by. You have to sit there and stare at the page, and flip back and forth, and let it sink in, and sometimes take a few minutes to just absorb everything in one panel.